Requiem for Harry Redknapp

Motion looks
like progress. It's the truest thing about sacking managers. Give
it a week, maybe a month, and you'll hear the predictable
mutterings from the fans. Harry had taken Spurs as far as he could,
they'll say. We blew a ten point lead over Arsenal. He bought in players who were too old,
he didn't plan for the future, he was tactically naïve…

Yet, as much at the Tottenham fans try to re-write
history, try to tell themselves this was ultimately for
the best, that we're moving forward, that it'll be different
now, we know we're deluding ourselves. For a group of fans who have
made self-delusion an art form, this realization really will be
something.

The sad, maddening, depressing truth is that
Tottenham Hotspur - a club that hadn't finished in the top four of
England's top flight since the 1989/90 season, 22 years ago - have
sacked a manager who finished fourth twice in four years. Who
ensured we tasted Champions League football for the first time in
our history. Who guided us to the quarter finals of the Champions
League itself, making us the first ever club ever to do so in our
debut season in Europe's elite club competition. Judged by the
feats of Manchester City or Chelsea - turbo-propelled to domestic and
European glory respectively by global ambition and blank cheques -
it may not seem like much. To Tottenham, it was everything.

The Wikipedia page alone will haunt us. We can
have our own opinions, but we can not have our own facts. Redknapp
ended his reign as the sixth best manager in our history.

The reasons for letting Redknapp go still aren't
clear. The relationship between Redknapp and the Tottenham
chairman, Daniel Levy, had "soured" apparently. Levy was reportedly
unhappy at Redknapp's public courting of the England job - a job,
it turned out, he was never asked to do. He wanted a longer
contract than Levy wanted to give. The love had gone.

Never have so many excuses meant so little.

What we do know is this: there is no scandal. There
was no smoking gun. There was no mid-table finish to hang him with,
no player revolt sully his name. Sure, Spurs eventually missed out
on qualifying for next year's Champions League by blowing a ten
point lead over Arsenal in the battle for third - and, despite
finishing fourth, eventually, ludicrously, in a cruel quirk of fate
that only happens to our dear hapless football club, Chelsea
winning the whole damn thing to take our slot - but if Tottenham
want to start sacking mangers for not finishing in the top three,
we really are in trouble.

There would at least be some semblance of sense if we
were Chelsea or Manchester City - if the demand for
unreasonable success was at least matched by unlimited wealth. It
is not. Tottenham Hotspur - under Levy's careful financial guidance
- are run like a business. Our top earners are dwarfed by their
counterparts at the top end of the Premier League. Our
expectations, seemingly, are not.

We operate at the chancer end of the transfer market.
We pick up kids - as we did with Gareth Bale and Kyle Walker - and
bank on turning them into superstars. We take a punt on players the
rest said wouldn't adapt to our league - as we did with the
diminutive playmaker Luka Modric - and prove everyone wrong. We
take players approaching the end of their careers - as we did with
Scott Parker - on the basis they can still do it for a few seasons
yet. We take the trouble-makers, the waifs and strays - as we
did with Emmanuel Adebayor - and pray that this time, maybe just
this time, they'll feel they've found a home. We are a club built
on hope. Sometimes, it's all we have to build on.

Perhaps with Redknapp we finally had too much of a
good thing. Perhaps we actually
started expecting success, rather than being
grateful to get it at all. They say it's the hope that kills you.
But it's the success that kills you too.

Under David Moyes - the practical Everton manager who
has been installed as clear favourite to take over - we will no
doubt be efficient. We won't sink. We'll stabilize. But Redknapp
leaving will be the bat signal for any of our star players who were
thinking of leaving. Modric will doubtless join Manchester United.
Gareth Bale could easily depart to Spain. Even the likes of Rafael
Van Der Vaart could seek pastures new.

Perhaps then - as we grind out a 0-0 away to
newly-promoted Reading and Moyes professes himself pleased with a
point gained - we'll look back. Back to a glorious period of
flowing, attacking football, the likes of which Spurs fans hadn't
seen in a generation. To the sight of Modric threading another
delicate ball through to Bale, and the Welshman thundering in
another left-foot drive. To the sight of Parker - back straight
like a meercat - readying a counter-attack, Lennon, Modric, Bale
and Adebayor already on the charge. The sight of our own arms aloft
at White Hart Lane, as we scored a third goal against reigning
European champions Inter Milan. The sight of Maicon - the most
feared full-back in world football - dropping down to his knees, a
broken man.

We got all we wanted and more. Perhaps we got too
much. The sad truth is, another generation may pass before we see
its like again. And perhaps then we'll look back to a time we
thought we were going forward - where one tide had seemingly
carried us as far as it could, while another seemed it could take
us further - and realise, to paraphrase Hunter S Thompson, we were
on the crest of a wave, and all that was left was for the wave to
finally break, and roll back.

Stuart McGurk

Stuart McGurk is a Senior Commissioning Editor at GQ. He has written for The Guardian, The Times, The Sunday Times, The Independent and the Telegraph.